Germany’s BND intelligence service sends “massive amounts” of intercepts to the NSA daily, according to a report based on Edward Snowden’s leaks. It suggests a tight relationship has been developed between the two agencies – which the BND claims is legal.

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Snowden and obtained by
Der Spiegel revealed that the 500 million pieces of phone and
email communications metadata collected by the NSA in Germany last December were
“apparently” provided with the BND’s approval.

The data was allegedly handed over at two collection sites as
part of the operation titled “Germany – Last 30 days.” One
of those collection sites has been identified as the Bavarian BND
facility at Bad Aibling, which the NSA is said to have officially
left back in 2004.

Der Spiegel’s investigation, which cites BND sources, says that
the code name of the Bad Aibling facility is mentioned in
Snowden’s papers as one of the signals intelligence activity
designators (SIGADs) employed by the US spy agency to collect the
data.

The BND source added that the mentioned name is “associated
with telecommunications surveillance in Afghanistan.”

Officially, however, Berlin is still waiting for an answer from
Washington as to where in Germany the metadata documented in the
NSA files was obtained, according to Der Spiegel. The
clarification of what and who are behind the so-called SIGADs,
and what sort of information was passed on, is an extremely
delicate matter for both the BND and the Chancellery - with
Angela Merkel’s chief of staff Ronald Pofalla being nominally in
charge of coordinating the country’s intelligence agencies.

The details in the recent report have sparked more uneasy
questions to be fired at Merkel’s government. Hans-Christian
Stroebele of Germany’s Green party has demanded an “immediate
investigation” of allegations, reminding that it has been
claimed up to now that the Americans had abandoned Bad Aibling
years ago and transferred control to Germany.

“Now we are reading that the NSA expanded their facility
there, received data on site and also analyzed it there. That is
a completely new development; that’s news that we have to follow
up on,” said Stroebele, who is also a member of the German
parliament’s intelligence oversight committee.

Frustrated that he and other committee members learned about the
BND’s data transfers to the NSA from a media report, Stroebele
stressed that “the government is playing the wrong game
there.”

But officials from the German foreign intelligence service
responded by saying the practice is completely legal, adding that
the two agencies have been closely working together for decades.

“The BND has worked for over 50 years together with the NSA,
particularly when it comes to intelligence on the situation in
crisis zones. The cooperation with the NSA in Bad Aibling serves
exactly these goals and it has taken place in this form for over
ten years, based on an agreement made in the year 2002,” the
BND said, as quoted by Deutsche Welle.

According to Snowden’s leaks, not only have the German agents
enjoyed access to the NSA’s latest tools, such as XKeyscore, but the US agents have also shown a keen
interest in several BND programs – which, according to the
report, were deemed even more effective than those of the NSA.

But the BND has assured that no data transferred to the NSA
contains information on German citizens – which, according to the
German agency’s chief Wolfgang Bosbach, would explain why the
government never mentioned the vast data transfers during the
testimony they gave to parliamentary committees after the NSA
scandal was unveiled.

“The transfer of data clearly did not involve German citizens
but rather data that the BND had collected in accordance with its
statutory mission,” Bosbach said.

“Before metadata relating to other countries is passed on, it
is purged, in a multistep process, of any personal data about
German citizens it may contain,” the BND said in response to
inquiries, as quoted by Deutsche Welle. The agency added that
there is currently “no reason” to believe that “the NSA
gathers personal data on German citizens in Germany.”

The BND is strictly forbidden from monitoring the communications
of German citizens by the G-10 law, a regulation anchored in the
country’s constitution that limits the powers of the intelligence
agencies.

However, it does not concern foreign intelligence, which,
according to the report, includes hundreds of thousands of
records from Middle Eastern satellite telephone providers,
thousands of mobile communications, and daily eavesdropping on
some 62,000 emails.

“The NSA benefits from this collection, especially
the…intercepts from Afghanistan, which the BND shares on a daily
basis,” the report says.

Such large-scale data transfer became possible after the BND
established a direct electronic connection to the NSA network in
Bad Aibling, it claims.

When the scandal initially emerged, German Chancellor Merkel
claimed that she learnt about the US surveillance programs
through press reports, and that she had had no knowledge of the
BND’s collaboration with the NSA.

Merkel, who is under pressure from critics ahead of the September
22 election, also stressed that Germany “is not a surveillance
state.”

However, she seemingly justified the NSA’s job, saying that “the work of
intelligence agencies in democratic states was always vital to
the safety of citizens and will remain so in the future.”
While being asked to clear up the situation with the US allegedly
bugging the embassies of European countries and EU facilities,
Merkel stressed that the US will remain Germany’s “most loyal
ally.”